Musician Archive

---

NewJedi wrote:

Aleyo, again I'm an international lawyer, not a copyright guy, but I can guess the answer. A composition program doesn't in itself facilitiate public performance of the song, and public performance is what constitutes infringement, not private performance. As I understand it, I can make a perfect cover of "Hey Jude" on Sonar at home and not infringe anyone's copyright. If I upload that same tune to the net, or perform it publicly, that's infringement.

As for clubs and bars, my understanding is that such places actually pay license fees to permit public performance of copyrighted material on their premises. At least that's what Garvin (another copyright attorney who occasionally posts here) said, or what I think he said, a while ago.

---

Usually I charge for this

NewJedi is again correct. A program which allows you to play and compose online has its purpose in public performance (and probably publishing as well). That is to say, it's useless to be able to compose unless you can publicly perform the song. Home composition programs could be used to write infringing items, but so can a pencil and a piece of paper. For that matter, so can the human voice...

The issue, in my jurisprudential opinion, is again that there is a substantial non-infringing use to the offline composition program. The substantial non-infringing use analysis is very fact specific. That is to say, it's difficult to predict ahead of time exactly how a court might rule.

And yes, bars, clubs, etc. do pay performance royalties. Or, at least, they are supposed to do so. Public establishments above a certain size that play a radio are also supposed to pay a performance royalty as well. The performance royalty is actually not very much -- maybe $500-$1000 per year for your average bar.

I se one non copy right issue with making compositions with note. Assuming that we do not reproduce other people work, it would require that anyone playing a musician had to have RL composer abilities.
I made a pose not to long ago entitled "Composing". A suggestion like that would give some composing ability without braking copyright laws or requiring huge amounts of RL skills to be a musician.

Atiknin, that was a very good summary of the basic issues involved. Thanks for the information.
It got me thinking though, and maybe you can answer this. What distinguishes an in-game composition device from a program that's made specifically for song composition (NoteWorthy, for example). Is it the intended performance aspect of the in-game device? I would imagine that some composition programs market the ability to share your compositions with friends, or play the music from within the program, so I can see that being an issue there too.
I think I could make an argument that I'm as likely to use a solely-for-composition program for my own creations as I am an in-game system, in terms of a substantial non-infringing use.
Any insight would be appreciated .